 Eyebrow nation
The French are obsessed with legs, Americans with breasts,
Brazilian with butts
and
for us Iranians, it's eyebrows
By Lida Ghassemi
August 15, 2003
The Iranian
"Her name is Lady Sun (Khorshid Khanom), or Mitra I guess.
She was the goddess that our ancestors in Iran worshiped long time
ago." I explain to a friend of
mine who is looking at Iranian artworks.
I look at the Lady Sun, the first thing that catches
my eyes are her eyebrows. The so called unibrow is the landmark
that carries
the symbol of Iranian beauty.
As an Iranian girl who has a thick eyebrow, with
plenty of hair, I do have a lot of memories related to them. Once
my Grandma looked at them and told me, "Long ago when I wanted to
do my eyebrows the eyebrow lady told me that they are not attached and this
was not fashionable
for a lady at that time, I had problem with my eyebrows up until European
fashion
arrived in Tehran." And she sighed, "You are one lucky gal, these
eyebrows can be shaped anyway you wish."
I remembered once my dad looked into my face, and
then turned to mom and said, "Remember
you had thick and beautiful eyebrows like her when we got married what
happened to them?" It is too much for a man like my dad to
remember anything physical, and to confess that he was in love
with anything. But the eyebrows, revealed
at least another side of him.
Once after an Iranian guy kissed me, he looked hard
into my face in a dim light and touched my eyebrows. "They
are thick and dark," he said. "Never plunk them, never thin them."
Me and my sister were complaining yesterday, that
no one in America does eyebrows the way they do them in
Iran. In fact I think I can declare Iran the Eyebrow
Nation. The French are obsessed with legs, Americans with breasts,
Brazilian with butts
and
for us Iranians, it's eyebrows.
I know it sounds lame or even gay, but I feel
as if it's the truth. Every Iranian man has the memory of the
most beautiful pair
of eyebrows
that he
has ever seen; the eyebrows as beautiful as Lady Sun's.
Every Iranian girl has a memory of the first day
she made her eyebrows; the day she could shape it, the day
she
felt
the most beautiful.
When we want to describe a girl in Iran the first
thing is, "The girl with the... eyebrows." The body
is not that important for an Iranian girl, at least not as important
as her eyebrows.
Eyebrows are all over Iranian paintings, they have
been for ages, nobody can deny that.
Maybe in all the years when Iranian women have
had to cover themselves up, they have only allowed men to see their
eyebrows,
and that's why eyebrows have become such an essential
part
of Iranian
beauty. Maybe if we didn't have to cover ourselves up, society
would have been obsessed over other parts of the Iranian woman.
We
are all over the eyebrow and
we are obsessed with it. If you don't believe me go and take
a look at yourself.
* Send
this page to your friends
|
Eyebrow nation
